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By Paula Jacobs at Accelerate Results

Industry analysts share their thoughts on green IT trends to watch in 2009.

1. Evolution to Green IT 2.0

Watch for a transition from green IT 1.0 to green IT 2.0—from an emphasis on reducing the carbon footprint to leveraging IT as an enabler of green business practices.

“Green IT is more about green practices and policies than about technology,” says Doug Washburn, an analyst with Forrester Research” (www.forrester.com).

Washburn sees a greater push toward a “green enterprise” model in which IT becomes a critical enabler for actively reducing environmental impact across its value chain activities whi le meeting financial goals.

Companies such as Nike and UPS have paved the way toward a green enterprise. Nike’s Considered Index desktop application empowers designers to make more eco-friendly decisions when designing shoes, and the UPS package/flow software, a supply chain program that eliminates left-hand turns, eliminates vehicle idle time to reduce energy consumption and fuel costs.

2. Increased Government Regulations, Compliance and Accountability

Government regulation and climate change management will present new risks, rules and opportunities, predicts Vernon Turner, senior vice president, Research, at IDC. These will relate to greenhouse gas emission targets; cap and trade; a carbon tax; carbon capture; energy security; and the building of smart environments, including grids, buildings and transportation systems.

IT will need to assume greater accountability for sustainability. That includes measuring energy consumption more accurately and demonstrating to shareholders and customers how it has reduced the carbon footprint.

Proper asset disposal will become increasingly important and subject to government regulations, including greater emphasis on disposing of older equipment in an environmentally responsible manner.

3. Convergence of Business, Economics and Technology

Green IT is built around three disciplines—business, economics and technology—says IDC’s Turner. In 2009 there will be a more compelling case for economic, environmental and social sustainability, including:

• Green manufacturing, supply chain and transportation management
• Carbon management, renewable distributed energy, the green data center, IT asset recycling and reverse logistics
• Community and NGO (nongovernmental organization) outreach

4. Increased Standardization and Accountability

Businesses and government bodies will pay closer attention to green IT standards.

“There are no accepted standards, which is the challenge,” says Turner. “There have to be global standards for technology.”

5. New Dimension to Virtualization

“Virtualization is still hot, but it is hot in a different regard,” says Jeffrey Hill, a computer industry analyst and coauthor of Green IT for Dummies, scheduled for April 2009 publication by John Wiley and Sons.

Instead of a primary focus on software virtualization technology and servers, virtualization will expand to include more storage solutions and tools that unify virtualization, desktop virtualization and cloud computing, with more vendors expected to enter the market. Other new virtualization trends to watch for:

• Increased use of virtualized servers in production mode
• Proliferation of desktop virtualization
• Cloud computing, with the shift of the infrastructure and sustainability burden to the cloud

In sum, 2009 will be the year that green IT optimizes business practices, green IT standards develop and across-the-board compliance becomes more important. Policies, procedures and processes will gain ground on technology solutions.

Paula Jacobs is a Massachusetts-based writer who covers business and technology.

ARMONK, NY - 05 Mar 2009: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today unveiled new database software to help companies make decisions more intelligently and maximize sales opportunities while reducing expenses.

With new Informix database software, global companies, for the first time, can both warehouse their data and conduct ultra fast online transactions with a simplified software platform. The combination of the two capabilities in one offering can help deliver new results and insights to grow businesses and lower costs by making it easier to use existing Informix infrastructure to help clients work as much as 50% more efficiently.

To effectively compete in today’s challenging global economy, companies are now recognizing the need to use information more effectively. Right now, 85% of CIOs do not believe their information is currently well managed and shared across the entire business. In addition, most companies lack a cohesive strategy to get the most value from their information.

“On a daily basis, our organization needs to extract patient data to track outstanding claims that are long overdue. It used to take us months to collect information that we are now able to retrieve in a matter of minutes,” said Dan Contaldi, vice president, Information Technology, Women’s Health. “Now, this technology allows more time for our central billing staff to focus on the business rather than spending hours sifting through the maze of outstanding claims. We see the addition of the Informix warehousing capabilities providing a complete and cost efficient solution.”

Konkan Railways in India uses this technology for its “Railway Application Package” system to help analyze and maintain train schedules to reduce the likelihood of passenger delays. Not only does this help the railway operate more efficiently, but it has also seen significant energy savings. By automating the light-switching at stations as trains arrive and depart, the system has helped the railway cut energy costs by approximately 20%.

IMPIRE AG, Germany’s largest provider of premium sporting content for live sporting event broadcasts, uses Informix software. IMPIRE is able to bring the most up-to-date sports replays and analysis across television, print, web and mobile services. The new warehouse capabilities will make it even easier for IMPIRE to build on its Informix foundation to continue to meet the demand of sports fans who want sports scores instantaneously.

Customers in all industries, including healthcare, retail and manufacturing, can take advantage of this instantaneous access to information with analytical capabilities to understand market and customer trends. For example, the new software can help retailers easily access and organize data from store, Web, catalog sales and internal inventory and merchandising systems to help analyze future buying trends and, in turn, make smarter business decisions.

“Today, the volume of information is growing exponentially from a variety of different sources. We are seeing a growing number of clients who need to manage the velocity of decision making required to be competitive, and the nature of what can be analyzed to predict new business opportunities,” said Arvind Krishna, vice president, IBM Worldwide Information Management Development. “The Informix warehouse platform can help companies manage their data more cost effectively with a simplified design and deployment using their existing Informix investments.”

IBM Informix Dynamic Server (IDS) is a strategic element of IBM’s Information Management software portfolio, which includes database management software that delivers exceptionally fast OLTP performance, high reliability and low cost administration.

IDS is a leading DBMS (database management systems) in many industries such as retail, telecommunications, government/public sector, and travel and entertainment. In North America alone, IDS is used in critical business applications by eight of the top 10 U.S. retailers and 95% of global telecommunications companies. Informix was named the #1 Vendor of 2008 in VendorRate due to input from its loyal customer base.

The Informix Warehouse Feature will be available to Informix customers worldwide beginning on March 5, 2009. Customers, developers and partners can find out more about this offering at www.ibm.com/informix/warehouse.

Storage, security concerns still tripping up virtualization deployments, IT Roadmap speakers say
By Jon Brodkin, Network World, 05/06/2009

Virtualization may spell doom for the 1U “pizza box” server, as the ability to pack multiple virtual machines onto physical hosts has customers choosing larger standard servers and blades.

The iconic pizza box servers can’t provide the VM density of blades, nor does it offer the levels of memory and CPU power found in larger 2U and 4U form factor servers, Nemertes Research analyst John Burke said Wednesday during Network World’s IT Roadmap conference in Boston.

That doesn’t mean pizza box servers are being thrown by the wayside when it comes to workloads running on non-virtualized servers. But in IT shops that make extensive use of hypervisors, “the 1Us are losing,” Burke said. “We expect that will continue.”

Nemertes surveys show most customers will not repurpose old servers for virtualization, instead buying new boxes that are more ideal for the partitioning technology. Blades, 2U and 4U servers “will almost completely replace the 1Us over the next few years” as hosts of VMs, he said.

Burke shared several other findings from Nemertes Research benchmark surveys of IT pros from a mix of small, medium and large enterprises. Ninety-three percent of surveyed IT pros are already using virtualization, though not necessarily in production. Nearly four out of five have virtual servers hosting customer-facing applications, while on the whole 38% of workloads are virtualized. About half the IT shops have seen quantifiable benefits from virtualization.

Disaster recovery is one of the main benefits. After virtualizing, 70% of respondents can fail systems over in less than an hour, while 26% can do so in five minutes. A third of respondents are able to fail over from a primary to a backup data center in less than an hour, while 10% are able to do so in less than five minutes. Before virtualizing, many small IT shops couldn’t even afford a disaster-recovery site, and those that could were seeing failover times of two or three days, Burke said.

The findings were based on in-depth conversations, rather than written surveys. Some of the findings were based on a sample size of about 75 respondents, while other findings were based on a sample size of about 200, Burke said.

At first glance, virtualization seems to improve manageability. On average, nine workloads are assigned to each administrator prior to virtualization, while after virtualizing more than 60 workloads can be handled by a single IT pro, Burke’s research indicates.

But the management tools IT is accustomed to upon aren’t designed for virtual systems, instead treating each server as a physical box hosting one application, he said.

“A lot of this is happening without robust support from the management tools they’re used to relying on,” Burke said. “There’s this level of complexity being added back into the data center.”

Virtualization makes spinning up new applications seem so easy that many IT shops go overboard, until they learn their lesson.
“Virtualization is like crack and people go crazy with it – for a while,” Burke said. Ultimately, data center managers learn to track life cycles and deploy VMs in a responsible manner.

One IT pro who spoke during the virtualization track also used the “crack” analogy, saying that configuration errors contributed to a recent headache-filled day in which 10 or so VMs became inaccessible. Paul Lantieri, network operations manager for the Division of Health Care Finance and Policy in the Massachusetts state government, said his VMware environment and Dell/EqualLogic ISCSI storage-area network were having problems communicating with each other. At one point, he discovered that the list of buffered commands that VMware has issued to the storage system was more than 12,000 long. Typically the number is less than five.

Ultimately, the government agency powered the entire data center down, after gaining assurances from vendors that they would not lose any critical data or workloads. To prevent future mishaps, Lantieri’s team has changed the way it allocates resources, reduced the number of VMs connected to each data store, and are teaching developers how to write code for a virtual environment.

“Virtualization is like crack sometimes,” Lantieri said. “You do things in the virtual world that you probably shouldn’t be doing. We were being too lenient and generous with our development groups.”

Storage is often a sticking point when it comes to virtualization, Burke said.

“A good number of the [IT pros we interviewed] had put virtualization projects on hold for six months to a year to get their storage networking stories straightened out,” Burke said. “They realized until they had networked storage that was virtualized appropriately they would not” achieve the benefits of virtualization, such as site recovery.

Security is another potential problem, and one that too many IT pros have ignored, according to Burke. Network managers who routinely set up robust security for physical resources haven’t done the same after virtualizing, neglecting to set up virtual firewalls and security zones, Burke said. Even if this doesn’t lead to security incidents, it could expose them to regulatory problems, he indicated.

“They were trading a level of assurance and auditability that they used to have for nothing,” Burke said. “They could not show that they had not produced an unacceptable level of risk. Their security teams had not been paying close attention.

This article is copyright 1995-2009 Network World, Inc. http://www.networkworld.com

Article By Pam Baker at http://www.cioupdate.com

Businesses are facing budgets so tight this year that many are simply unrealistic. Still, the show must go on. Universally, the charge is to “get the most value out of current technology offerings, without sacrificing the latest innovations,” said Stephen Yeo, worldwide strategic marketing director at IGEL. To this end, here are six tips to stretch your IT budget and still make headway in these challenging times.

1. Repurpose Software You Already Own

“Across industries, customers found they could easily extend their existing software to handle other business functions, without the hassle of buying, implementing and managing new software,” explains Michele McFadden, director of Product Management at Numara Software.

In fact, repurposing has become “recession chic” and a bit of a bragging point as IT managers race to stretch their imaginations in inventive ways. Quite often one good idea leads to another. “For instance, we have clients who originally bought our Numara FootPrints software to streamline their IT service operations and manage incidents, service requests and change requests throughout their lifecycle from initial contact to resolution,” said McFadden. “Then, a number of our customers started thinking of ways to use that software in other departments, such as deploying it in the HR department to monitor employee requests and new hires, or in the facilities department to track repairs and office equipment requests.”

McFadden said repurposing efforts of the software grew from there. Customers are using Numara FootPrints for external customer service in their call centers, bug tracking in their development group, and for compliance tracking across the organization and enrollment tracking at universities. The Colorado Department of Corrections is even using it to track prison transfers. “And that’s just one sample of the creative ways our customers solve their business problems with a single tool,” she said. “It’s straightforward and it’s what we think of as, ‘thinking outside the software’s box.’”

2. Manage IT Operations More Efficiently

 ”As IT professionals, we’re constantly focused on how we can help make the business more efficient and productive, leaving little time to assess our internal processes and staff productivity,” said Carol Fawcett, VP of Information Services at Quest Software. “Now IT is being asked to do more with flat or, in some cases, declining budgets, forcing us to rethink where and why we’re spending our dollars and time.” Fawcett advises every CIO to do three things:

• Automate repetitive tasks, such as user provisioning, which follows a path from new hire to department/management changes to termination. This is the least costly way to increase productivity, yet has the highest impact on IT.
• Implement a set of monitoring tools that work in the background, automatically alerting the proper team member when an issue arises. This allows your team to stay focused on business-enhancing projects rather than having their concentration constantly interrupted to look at a monitor and assess the current state.
• Enable your business users to do some of the work themselves. Self-service tools for basic activities such as resetting passwords, updating contact numbers and creating custom reports will not only decrease the strain on IT, but also improve customer satisfaction by granting them instant gratification.
   

Quest suggests implementing tools that automate the provisioning, re-provisioning and de-provisioning of users, to reduce administrative time while also improving security around access by former employees.

3. Reuse Old Hardware

 The present state of the economy and credit crunch is causing organizations to pause and assess their current IT investments. While reusing old hardware immediately comes to mind, often it’s hard to push old technology further. Vendors see the need and some are offering innovative ways to help reuse old hardware. IGEL Technology, for example, offers a unique way to extend the life of legacy PCs. IGEL’s $160 PC to thin client conversion card allows organizations to instantly convert their old PCs into modern thin clients that provide access to any server-based application or virtual desktop with the look and feel of a traditional PC.

“The appeal of thin clients over PCs, especially from a cost perspective, is pretty straightforward; they’re greener, easier to manage and more secure,” said Yeo. “However, not many organizations at this point in time have the funds to allocate towards new hardware or software subscriptions.”

Yeo said studies show that thin clients can pay themselves back within their six year life-cycle on energy savings alone, and this can be reduced to four years or less if the existing PC environment has to be air-conditioned. The PC to thin client conversion card includes IGEL’s Universal Management Suite. This allows companies to not only sweat their old PC assets while moving towards a modern, server-based, infrastructure, it also removes the need to buy desktop Internet security and management software, saving probably $50 per year on software costs, Yeo estimates.

“If organizations can then legally move their old Windows XP licenses off the old PCs and migrate them to virtual machines on the server, they can enjoy a very modern infrastructure at an extremely small cost in hard economic times,” said Yeo.

4. Get “More For Less” With Managed Services

Managed services can help IT departments get ‘more for less’ by allowing internal IT staff to focus on their company’s unique strategic business initiatives and eliminating the need to invest in new technologies. “CIOs and their staffs can’t do it all, especially when globalization is a top priority,” said Bill Dodds, VP of Sales and Marketing at Virtela. “Trying to coordinate contracts with multiple vendors, in multiple languages and multiple currencies to build a best in class infrastructure puts an enormous strain on IT that’s not sustainable in a recession.”Analysts at firms like IDC and Gartner are predicting that demand for managed services will increase in the recession, and Dodds said Virtela has seen that growth firsthand. “For example, when it comes to communications infrastructure, companies need multiple technologies, seamlessly integrated around the globe, but they can’t afford to spread themselves thin,” he explains. “Managed network service providers can give businesses a single source for the technologies and expertise they require even as their needs evolve, in an on demand, scalable site-by-site basis.”

Virtela suggests companies leverage managed service providers (MSP) for their telecom and networking services. By investing in MSPs, IT departments can still benefit from new and innovative technologies without spending money on hardware, infrastructure or internal management and monitoring, allowing them to keep pace with technological innovation even on a tight budget.

5. Automate Enterprise-Wide Processes

“Many people don’t realize that 50% of all application processes are still run as batch jobs,” said Ken Jackson, president of the Americas division at UC4 Software “This means that IT is spending a lot of time and money kicking off, monitoring, and handling failures of routine jobs.”

By automating batch processing with workload automation solutions, CIOs will save staff time and improve services by speeding up processes and reducing application downtime due to human errors and conflicting jobs. For example, Jackson cites a large energy provider that used UC4’s workload automation solution to reduce their total invoice processing time by four hours. As a result of being able to send customer invoices a full day earlier, they received the payments faster, and saved almost $30,000 in one year alone, he said.

“IT can’t afford to slow down. A workload automation solution will not just enable IT to survive current budget and staff cuts, but actually improve their services and alignment to the business in spite of them,” said Jackson.

6. Leverage Your Existing Reports For BI

“In today’s economic crisis, one of the fastest ways to save resources and make smarter business decisions is to leverage your existing reports for BI,” said John Kitchen, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Datawatch Corp.

Datawatch recommends taking an inventory of your existing resources—such as reports and other business documents—to see if the information you need to make better business decisions is actually hidden in plain sight. “Many IT professionals mistakenly believe that they have to implement complex and costly BI tools, when in reality they can easily get the business intelligence they’re seeking from existing reports,” said Kitchen. “In a nutshell, we’re helping companies weather the recession by addressing the immediate need for BI at a fraction of the time, cost and complexity of traditional BI solutions.”